m₂ @msub2@widerweb.org

I don't really have a grand point here, I just think the whole situation is kind of silly and that Mozilla should never have laid off their XR team to begin with. They've done little to inspire confidence that things will ever change and I just felt like ranting a bit.

Even promising continuations of past work done by community members, like with https://github.com/mrxz/webxr-linux, can only go so far, as you'd still have to convince someone with Level 3 commit access to land your patches for you, and right now there's no guarantee they'd say yes.

Firefox was the only browser that seemed interested in getting WebVR/WebXR working on both Windows AND Linux. Chrome/Chromium is tied to D3D11 and WebKit has no Windows presence (I've tried doing a WinCairo build with WebXR enabled in the past, couldn't get it to work sadly).

New bugs from as recently as last month are closed as WONTFIX with no further comment, which is honestly just kinda frustrating to see. WebVR was conceived AT Mozilla for crying out loud https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1785869

Even groups like Igalia, who now manage Wolvic (formerly Firefox Reality) have to use their own fork of Gecko, especially when their attempts to contribute/resolve changes upstream are just getting closed as WONTFIX https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1771854

Even if my C++ skills and understanding of Gecko's internals were better it'd probably STILL be an uphill battle to land a working WebXR implementation, considering they've stated publicly they have no plans for it whatsoever.

Just before that, only about 3 people were doing most of the work on it, all of whom were let go during the 2020 layoff and are now employed elsewhere. I tried myself to pick up some of the issues, but anyone who's done browser dev can imagine how daunting that ended up being.

Why should I be forced to use another company's browser to get the full functionality out of a *Mozilla* product? I can't be the only one that thinks that's a bit ridiculous, right? And I haven't even mentioned how work on the WebXR implementation basically stopped 2 years ago.

"This is extremely detramental [sic] to building an accessible VR platform since explaining to attendees how to enable the DOM element manually is difficult."

I agree. You can argue that mobile VR comes first now but there's still lots of Vives, Rifts, and Indexes out there.

literally a bug report from someone trying to enter VR in Hubs on Firefox and failing because dom.vr.enabled is false by default now https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1775027

absolutely boggles my mind that @mozilla continues to support Mozilla Hubs and yet one of the major features (WebXR support) doesn't even work in their own browser by default anymore (rant incoming)